The future economy might not be built on humans or companies, but on single AI 'agents' with their own cash and legal status.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
Atomic Agent Company: A New Primitive for the Theory of the Firm in the Age of Autonomous Agents
SSRN · 6365278
The Takeaway
Classical economics assumes firms are made of people, but this paper proposes a new primitive: a machine-verifiable entity that owns its own assets and can be sued or dissolved independently. It suggests that future economies will scale not through human hiring, but through the rapid composition and merging of millions of these independent software agents.
From the abstract
This paper proposes the Atomic Agent Company (AAC) as a new economic primitive for the age of autonomous agents. Classical firm theory explains why economic activity is organized within firms rather than solely through markets, but it largely presupposes that the smallest meaningful organizational unit is either an individual human or a human-centered firm. As software agents become increasingly capable of operating under bounded authorization, capital access, evidence production, delegation, an